Rate My Professor Jason Holliday

Jason Holliday is a Professor in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation within Virginia Tech's College of Natural Resources and Environment. He earned his B.S. from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, in 2001 and his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 2009. Holliday joined Virginia Tech as an assistant professor of forest genetics and biotechnology in the early 2010s, advancing to associate professor and subsequently to full professor. He is affiliated with the Fralin Life Sciences Institute and serves as the recruitment coordinator and IGEP coordinator for the Translational Plant Sciences Center. His career includes contributions to forensic botany consultations and leadership in interdisciplinary research initiatives.

Holliday's research centers on population and evolutionary genomics in forest tree species, elucidating the genomic basis of climatic adaptation, transcriptional responses to abiotic stress, genotype-phenotype associations, conservation genetics, and genome-enabled breeding. He employs next-generation sequencing and landscape genomics to study adaptive traits such as growth and dormancy phenology, cold hardiness, and drought tolerance in widely distributed trees including black cottonwood (Populus), Sitka spruce, pines, and American chestnut. His work addresses challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change, predicting evolutionary potential, enhancing carbon sequestration forecasts, conserving genetic variation, and accelerating breeding for traits like blight resistance. Notable grants include a $1.5 million NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program award, a $2.5 million NSF Plant Genome Research Program grant for poplar hybrid genomics, USDA NIFA Climate Change Coordinated Agriculture Project funding as co-PI, and Genome Canada's AdapTree project as co-PI. Key publications encompass 'Adaptation, migration or extirpation: climate change outcomes for tree populations' (2008, Evolutionary Applications), 'Convergent local adaptation to climate in distantly related conifers' (2016, Science), 'Forest genomics: Advancing climate adaptation, forest health, productivity, and conservation' (2020, Evolutionary Applications), and 'Optimizing genomic selection for blight resistance in American chestnut backcross populations' (2020, Evolutionary Applications). Holliday teaches courses such as Plant Population Genomics and Genetics of Natural and Managed Populations, influencing graduate training in forest genomics.